Blood Red Sea

11

Nicholas leaned down low behind his horse’s stretching neck, hair and mane blown back in the hot night. His thighs gripped the horse’s belly, his hands on its withers, kicking furiously all the way. And no idea what quality of horse this was, but unlikely to be a match for the beautiful Arab horses of the Sipahis.

Dust and stars, sweat and terrible thirst. He twisted and looked back. A dust cloud coming on, a dust cloud with white Arab stallions emerging ghostly from it, white horses riding on waves of dust. Even as he felt the cold dread of a lance in his side, there was the unspeakable beauty of it all. The starlit world, the night, the thunderous galloping, the terror and the coursing of his blood.

They burst into a sparse pinewood and veered back and forth through the trees, whiplashed and torn by low branches, horses stumbling, dangerously close to being lamed. The horses’ hoof-falls muffled on the needles, the sullen drumbeat of the Sipahis’ horses behind them, as many as fifty men.

‘Oh, for a sword, for one damn blade!’ cried Smith.

But all they had was the silk robes they wore.

‘It is having no armour or weapons that may yet save us,’ called Giustiniani. ‘At least we travel light!’

‘Then more speed!’ roared Smith, heeling his horse’s flanks without mercy. ‘I’m as light as a giddy girl!’

They came out of the wood again and across a dry burnt plain, then a stubble field burned black. Greek peasants had destroyed all they had, even their own fields of wheat, before the oncoming Turks. They would rather starve than feed the enemy, now they had heard of the agony of Nicosia, the treachery and the despair, and most of all the sacking of the churches, the desecration of the holy icons. Gradually the atrocities of the invader were doing what such atrocities always do: they were hardening the people against them.

At last the drumbeat of pursuing hooves seemed to fall back. They dared to look round — the dust cloud was far behind.

Yet still they rode on, the moon overhead, a few thin clouds racing.

After some more miles, Mazzinghi let out a great whoop.

‘Brother,’ said Giustiniani sharply. ‘Less noise now.’

Then he relaxed his own horse into a trot and they all did likewise. He looked around at them and his eyes gleamed. Despite the bloodshed, despite the loss of the city, this was a moment of unreal exhilaration. They still lived, to fight another day.

Beyond a rise they came to a halt. The flanks of Nicholas’s horse were foaming and going like furnace bellows, and then it put out a hind leg and leaned at an unnatural angle.

‘Off!’ cried Hodge, and, seizing Nicholas, he dragged him sideways as the horse toppled away and fell on its side. Nicholas clambered to his feet where he sprawled in the dust, swiped his face and moved round to examine the poor beast.

The stricken animal’s breathing was shallow; blood coursed from its nostrils and its wide white eyes saw nothing. The breathing suddenly stopped, the flow of blood came to a halt.

‘Dismount all,’ said Giustiniani.

Even if the Sipahis still came on now, they had no dogs with them to follow the fugitives’ traces. They were surely safe.

They led the other five horses into an orchard of lemon trees. The air was sweet.

Nicholas looked back at the dead horse. Innocence died easy.

They found a deserted village and enough stale water in a stone trough to slake their horses’ thirst. But no more mounts, not even a mule or donkey. Nicholas would have to ride with Hodge. It was only another two or three leagues to the walls of Famagusta. They should make it by dawn or soon after.

They rested for half an hour and then walked on. They found a goat, tethered and unmilked, and drank her milk, a few mouthfuls each. Then they turned her loose. A little farther on there was a well, and Stanley pronounced it not poisoned. Nevertheless they drank slowly and carefully.

Behind them all was darkness still, and fallen Nicosia still burned. After three days of looting, no doubt the churches would be washed clean of Christian blood. The cathedral would be turned into a mosque and sanctified by prayer, the uncouth flagstones covered in fine carpets for the bare feet of the faithful. A Christian church was like a stable, and the Christians tramped in still wearing their dusty and grimy boots, even before their God.

In the east the sky was greying.

‘I think I can almost see the towers and spires of Famagusta,’ murmured Stanley. ‘Hear the waves breaking at the foot of her mighty walls.’

‘Is she really so beautiful a city as they say?’ asked Hodge.

‘A fairy-tale city built on sand, tawny as a lion. . I think she is the most beautiful city I ever saw after Jerusalem.’

They shivered. Even the name sounded like poetry.

City of the vanished Lusignan Kings.

Lost city of the sand.

Fabled Famagusta. .

The outlying country around Famagusta was burned black, with barely a tree standing nor one stone upon another.

‘I’m impressed,’ said Smith. ‘What was his name again?’

‘Bragadino. Governor Bragadino. You remember we met his two sons in Sicily?’

Smith nodded, and Nicholas remembered them too. A pair of green-eyed panthers, softly spoken, watchful and lethal. He wished they were with their father now.

The sun was just up and the day brightening fast. They wanted to be within the walls soon.

There was a pool in a hollow, but it smelt foul. Already poisoned, like every well in the district. Nevertheless Mazzinghi knelt down beside it.

‘Drink that, you’ll never see the fair ladies of Famagusta,’ said Stanley.

Mazzinghi said, ‘Just checking my bandage.’

Smith frowned. ‘Let me see the wound.’

Mazzinghi sprang to his feet again. ‘The wound is fine. I just want my bloody bandage to look its best when we ride into the city.’

Smith’s eyes bulged.

Mazzinghi turned side-on to give the battered older knight a view of his damnably handsome young features, offset by the broad white bandage around his wide forehead. ‘I think, of all the accessories a soldier can sport to win the ladies, a fresh bloody bandage about the forehead is the best,’ he said. ‘Somehow a bandage about the foot or the thigh is just not so effective. It doesn’t set off one’s noble visage nearly so well.’

Smith said, ‘Though as a Knight of St John, the thought of fair ladies never crosses your mind.’

‘Of course not,’ said Mazzinghi with a grin. ‘Heaven forbid.’

There was one hut suspiciously untouched, and inside a table with a ripe goat’s cheese on a wooden trencher. Nicholas eyed it longingly.

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Stanley.

‘What if we cook it?’

He shook his head. ‘That won’t destroy the poison.’

Smith kicked the table hard, the cheese shot to the floor and he stomped it into the earth. ‘That wouldn’t have fooled the Turks for a moment,’ he said. ‘But they’d have fed it to a prisoner, to test it, and he’d have died.’

It was Hodge who first said he could see towers and spires through the heat haze. They rode on a little, and then it was unmistakable. A fairy tale of a city indeed, something out of an ancient chapbook or prayerbook, Gothic lances of stonework rising into the shimmering burning air. A mighty wall all around it, and the tang of the sea on the air.

Nicholas twisted behind Hodge and reached into his small knapsack and drew out a familiar square of old cloth. He shook it out in front of Smith, red rag to a bull.

The Standard of Malta.

‘You. .’ Smith scowled. ‘You took it down from the walls? You carried it through captivity? Why on earth did you not hand it to me, then? If they had found it on you, boy, they would have put you to the torture in an instant.’

Nicholas pushed the cloth into Smith’s hands. ‘I forgot I had it,’ he said vaguely.

‘You forgot? You lie.’

The boy turned away and he and Hodge heeled the horse and it clopped forward again, tired head nodding.

Smith and Stanley and Giustiniani sat their horses a moment and looked after them. The rising sun haloed the two riders in bronze sunlight, their thin grubby figures almost silhouetted. Each of them but twenty-two years of age, and to veteran knights like these, mere boys still. And yet what a pair. The faithful, long-suffering Hodge, shrewd survivor; and Nicholas himself, wanderer, exile, vagabond, robbed of his rightful inheritance, world-weary but still full of young desire for the world.

‘If I didn’t know him for a worthless tosspot and whoremonger,’ murmured Stanley, ‘I’d say Master Ingoldsby had kept a hold on that standard deliberately. So that if it was found by our captors, he would have been punished for it and not you.’

Smith rubbed his beard. ‘As tosspots and whoremongers go, perhaps he isn’t the worst.’

Then Giustiniani pointed towards a scurry of dust over the plain, and said, ‘We have company.’

‘Another good sign,’ said Stanley. ‘Dandolo never did outriders.’

‘Draw up!’ cried Smith. ‘No weapons!’ And he shook out the Standard of Malta and held it high.

Stanley had a vision of how it might appear to a passing bird. Their tiny group, so small upon the vast burnt plain, six men on five horses, surrounded by a troop of disciplined cavalry, lances lowered, forming a tight circle.

The cavalry captain sat his jouncing horse and demanded, ‘Who goes here?’

‘God with you,’ said Giustiniani. ‘Knights of St John and gentlemen volunteers. All six of us.’ He smiled, nodding towards Famagusta. ‘We are come to save your poor city.’

The captain said, ‘We know Nicosia is finished. How far off is the Turk? Our scouts have reported nothing.’

‘Another day or two,’ said Giustiniani. ‘We have ridden hard all night. And we are not pulling cannon.’

‘Follow me. Fast trot!’